Behind the Green Door EP

Less than a year since Laurel Halo released her debut full-length for Hyperdub, she returns with a four-track EP for the label. If Quarantine resembled an amalgam of flesh and machine, here Halo goes one step closer to erasing humanity from the frame by including none of her trademark vocal swoops.

Featured Tracks:

"Throw"

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Laurel Halo

It's less than a year since Laurel Halo released her debut full-length album for Hyperdub, the brittle, beautiful Quarantine. This four-track EP for the same label makes that record feel light-years away. The vocals are gone, the sense of space has all but vanished. If Quarantine resembled a Cronenbergian amalgam of flesh and machine, here Halo goes one step closer to erasing humanity from the frame. Those swooping vocal takes feel absent at first. It's hard not to mourn their removal, and worry about the premature halting of an idea that had long life in it yet. On further plays, though, Behind the Green Door casts a different shadow over Quarantine, just as that album did with her prior work. It makes Quarantine a stronger, bolder piece, gaining a little extra weight due to the sense of isolation, even among Halo's own work, that surrounds it.

The sense of forward momentum merges into the music on Behind theGreen Door in a quite literal sense; these aren't exactly club bangers, but the feeling of propulsion is aided by the beats that underpin all four tracks. Those rhythms guide Halo down a purposefully tangled path, picking up elements of house music and minimal techno along the way, but cloaking them in a sense of agitation that's barely kept below surface level. This isn't exactly angry music, but there is a feeling of itchy unease that runs as a theme throughout. "NOYFB" is the best embodiment of this, with each new layer feeling slightly out of step with everything that came immediately prior. It's disorienting, which is, it seems, Halo's favorite place to be, allowing her to construct worlds that immediately get pulled down and discarded on the cutting room floor. She never appears fully satisfied in the present moment, always eager to move on somewhere else.

Halo has commented on the "sexual energy" of these tracks, setting up a fascinating disparity between the title of the EP (taken from a well-known porn film from the 1970s, which was among the first hardcore pictures to gain wide distribution) and the tender pound that thumps through a track like "Sex Mission". If there is a sexual energy, it's wide-ranging, bridging from moments of quiet joy and reflection to feelings of loneliness and alienation. But the sense of distance being gained while human aspects recede, at least compared to what came before on Quarantine, adds a further twist. The bass drum beats and bursts of stiff electronics that rise in "UHFFO" suggest a darker sensuality, something more akin to the dystopian sci-fi dreams of Demon Seed, the 70s horror feature in which Julie Christie is impregnated by a supercomputer. The underlying themes of that film-- of technology being abused, breaking down, fudging the lines between what's real and artificial-- serve as a useful parallel to the feel of Behind the Green Door.

It's interesting to listen back to Hour Logic, Halo's 2011 EP for Hippos in Tanks, in light of the moves she's made here. In many ways the two releases feel like the flipside of a utopian dream, with the earlier work all brash outward moves, caught up in a moment of cautious optimism. "Throw" from this EP is noticeably harder, more pessimistic in outlook, with the warped, house-y piano stabs the perfect dysfunctional hook to signal a sense of restlessness. There's a feeling of moving away from something, not to a space necessarily much darker than some of Quarantine, but certainly one where chaos and decline are taking a stronger hold. The title of the EP makes more sense in that context, if you take the enormous popularity of Behind the Green Door as a sort of ground zero for the subsequent wave of seedy profiteering that the adult film industry would be built upon. This work feels more in tune with decay and exploitation in sexual portrayal, the numbness accrued from a constant barrage of imagery, than anything that’s notionally "sexy."